Privacy

Big Brother Inc.

Knowing your business is big business for Aristotle Inc., whose Orwellian database of voter records has been an essential campaign tool for every president since Ronald Reagan. As the 2008 race heats up, the company’s shadowy founder, John Aristotle Phillips, unveils his most powerful personal-space invader yet.

In Washington, D.C., power often resides in faceless corners. Consider Aristotle Inc., whose offices occupy a nondescript town house on Pennsylvania Avenue, just out of view of the Capitol Building. On a warm fall morning during the last congressional-campaign season, I find myself in a conference room there as Aristotle’s founder and C.E.O., John Aristotle Phillips, shows off his latest innovation. Phillips is in the business of political data mining—he finds out everything he can about individual voters and then sells that information to politicians—and the tool he’s demonstrating for me could be seen as a breakthrough in electoral politics, or a new low in privacy invasion, depending on your perspective. The culmination of nearly a quarter-century of digging up information on tens of millions of Americans, it’s called Aristotle 360. The best way to think of it is as a hal2000 for running campaigns.

“What we do is help a campaign run more and more like an effective business,” Phillips says as he types on his laptop, bringing up on a large projection screen the profile of an actual voter in Atlanta, whom we’ll call John Smith.

Phillips hits a button and up pops Smith’s basic information—address, phone number, etc. A click of the mouse brings more personal information—his photograph, his age and occupation, the names of his adult family members, his party affiliation and approximate income. Another click summons the exact amounts of political donations he has made. Phillips clicks once more, and a kind of molecular model appears on-screen, showing every political donor and potentially influential person Smith is linked to, in Atlanta and beyond, with dozens of interlocking nodes. Each node leads to the profile of another voter, about whom Aristotle knows just as much or more.

This is how information once considered personal moves in the brave new world of 21st-century campaigning. In this world, thanks to a handful of shadowy high-tech firms such as Aristotle, politicians often know more about you than you do about them. If you vote or donate to candidates or causes, chances are that campaign strategists working for Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Rudy Giuliani, or Mitt Romney—or all of them—have you profiled already.

Aristotle’s massive private database contains detailed information about roughly 175 million American voters. “It’s not that [Aristotle’s] list is good—they’re considered to have the only list,” says Richard Viguerie, the venerable conservative strategist. “Aristotle is the premier company in that area. If you want to get into demographics, I don’t know that they even have a competitor.”

The databases being built by the Republican and Democratic National Committees have received a lot of attention lately, but Aristotle’s is probably bigger than either. Indeed, the R.N.C. has been buying information from Aristotle for years. Aristotle’s clients among the current crop of presidential candidates include Giuliani, Fred Thompson, and Christopher Dodd, not to mention the anti-immigration barnstormer Tom Tancredo. And most of the other candidates employ some data-mining firm that learned its business in part from Aristotle, which has served as a consultant for every president since Ronald Reagan, according to Phillips. In the 2006 elections, Aristotle sold information to more than 200 candidates for the House of Representatives (even its Republicans had an astounding win record), a good portion of those running for Senate, and candidates for governor from California to Florida, to New York.

An example of Aristotle in action: During the 2000 Republican presidential-primary season, Arizona senator John McCain was the media-darling challenger to Texas governor George W. Bush. Bush loyalists in Virginia decided to play hardball, holding the state voter lists hostage, according to a McCain campaign official. Without access to them, McCain couldn’t get the 10,000 signatures he needed to put his name on the state ballot. McCain’s desperate campaign managers called Phillips, who went to work immediately, creating a targeted list of Virginia Republicans known to vote in primaries and cross-referencing that with Aristotle’s files on Internet users in the state. Soon, matching subjects were seeing banner ads on their computer screens urging them to give the senator their signatures. McCain’s name was on the ballot in a matter of days. (It’s worth noting that Bush and McCain were both Aristotle clients in 2000.)

John Jameson, president of the Democratic campaign consultancy Winning Connections, recounted a similar story to me. It was five p.m. on Election Day in Los Angeles in 2001, and the exit polls were not indicating a sure win for Jameson’s client, mayoral candidate James Hahn. Jameson called Aristotle and put in an immediate order for its list of Los Angeles Democrats. Jameson downloaded the list within seconds and turned out an extra 20,000 to 30,000 voters, by his estimate, to pull levers for Hahn. He beat his opponent by a margin of 7 percent. “Campaigns are like one-day sales,” Phillips says. “You have to get all the shoppers in the store on one day.”

Aristotle was founded in 1983 by Phillips, a onetime aspiring aerospace engineer and liberal activist, and his younger brother, Dean, an M.I.T.-trained computer scientist. From the outside, Aristotle looks like a typical Beltway outfit. It employs about 100 technicians, consultants, and salespeople at its headquarters, near Capitol Hill, and at offices in Atlanta, San Francisco, Toronto, London, and Spanish Fork, Utah.

Phillips, then 21 and a Princeton University junior, at a Princeton-Columbia football game in October 1976, in New York. Phillips played the team’s mascot. By Ron Frehm/AP Images.

Train the microscope on Phillips himself, however, and a curious story emerges. The son of Greek immigrants, Phillips ran for Congress while still in his early 20s, and nearly won. His platform was anti-nuclear-proliferation, a cause he took up in the 1970s when, as a precocious undergraduate at Princeton University, he set out to design an atomic bomb—just to show how frighteningly easy it was. He published a memoir about the experience, Mushroom: The True Story of the A-Bomb Kid, and even got himself cast in a proposed TV movie based on it.

But for the past two decades Phillips has worked in the shadows, compiling his vast database. He likes to compare it to the Human Genome Project, which seems apt: both are marvels of technology that can yield impressive yet troubling results. If Aristotle can be blamed for helping Karl Rove take swing states from John Kerry in 2004 (Federal Election Commission records show that Bush-Cheney ’04 and the Republican National Committee paid Aristotle hundreds of thousands of dollars for its information), it must also be credited with helping Viktor Yushchenko foil election fraud the same year to become the president of Ukraine. Aristotle also owns a 35-million-person database for the U.K., which was used by at least one candidate in London’s last mayoral race.

And yet, for all his clout, Phillips is a cipher in Washington. Few have heard of him—this is a man who knows how to keep his name off lists—and of those few, hardly any are willing to comment. “He furnishes the intelligence,” one prominent campaign consultant said on condition of anonymity. “He is the facilitator.”

Phillips, who has never cooperated with a major article about his company until now, shuns the press. While this could fairly be called hypocritical, he has good reason to stay out of sight.

“This is the scourge of our age,” says former California secretary of state Kevin Shelley, who in 2001 tried unsuccessfully to take on the political data-mining industry. “People are getting hassled by marketing firms and hassled by consultants, and much of that information comes from signing petitions or off the voting databases.

“If the American public had any idea just how much of their private lives was out there, there would be a revolution,” Shelley says.

Aristotle can tell its clients more than just the predictable stuff—where you live, your phone number, who lives with you, your birthday, how many children you have. It may also know how much you make, how much your house is worth, what kind of car you drive, what Web sites you visit, and whether you went to college, attend church, own guns, have had a sex change, or have been convicted of a felony or sex crime. It can pry into every corner of your life.

And while it’s true that millions of Americans have grown comfortable with the idea of posting their own personal information on social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, what Aristotle does is far more comprehensive—and anything but voluntary. “[Aristotle’s] records go back to the beginning of computers, in the 1970s,” says University of Washington professor Philip Howard, the author of New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen. “If people got to see how much data on their personal credit cards, driving records, magazine subscriptions, and political contributions—20, 30 years’ worth of history—is collected in these places, that would be very upsetting to most Americans. And there’s no chance of opting out of or accessing these political databases. We don’t have access to our electronic political identities.”

These electronic identities are valuable for a reason: the more private information a candidate has, the more effectively he or she can “micro-target” voters. In the 2004 presidential race, Karl Rove and his team applied this strategy masterfully in battleground states such as Ohio, where they sent shock troops into Democratic pockets of blue-collar workers and minorities with personalized appeals to the churchgoing, the gun-owning, the abortion-hating. The result was a lead of 130,000 votes that tipped the election to Bush.

“Any little edge you can get—credit cards, if someone subscribes to Time magazine—is going to help you,” Richard Viguerie says. In Ohio’s Democratic precincts in 2004, he says, “Rove went into union neighborhoods there and found the people who were concerned with gay marriage and just peeled them off. He was drilling in their backyards.”

Micro-targeting “allows you to think about people in an individual way,” says Terry Nelson, the political director for the 2004 Bush campaign, who until recently was John McCain’s campaign manager. “In a world where everybody makes a habit of blocking out the communication they receive unless they have a specific interest in it, you have to know more about each person.”

Ken Strasma, president of Strategic Telemetry, which has been doing a lot of micro-targeting for Barack Obama’s campaign in Iowa and elsewhere, says the technology being employed in the 2008 presidential race far outstrips that of just four years ago. Obama and other candidates have the ability to custom-tailor cable-television ads down to the Zip Code in Iowa, or send a canvasser to a voter’s doorstep armed with a computer-generated picture of that person’s political personality. “We’re predicting how people talk and think about politics just like banks predict people’s spending habits and credit-worthiness,” he says.

‘We work best when we’re working behind the scenes,” Phillips says after ordering a glass of wine at the Tabard Inn, an old-world D.C. institution whose 19th-century paneling and oil portraits contrast nicely with the Orwellian undertones that follow him around. “It doesn’t benefit our clients for them to see a newspaper story about how great our technology is. Every campaign that we work with wants you to believe that it’s shoe leather that wins the race, or great issues, or the love of the people, but the fact of the matter is a lot of it is the nitty-gritty organization.”

Phillips doesn’t want to be thought of as a Beltway insider. He lives with his wife, Patty, a former Wilhelmina model, who teaches at an arts high school, and their 12-year-old daughter in a town house in San Francisco’s Marina District. Still, like any good Washington macher, he has that rare gift of making his personal ambitions and the public good seem indistinguishable.

“I understand that point of view,” he says of the notion that voters might not want to be micro-targeted. “But I happen to think the rights of the speaker, in the case of political speech, and for the good of society, outweigh the rights of the recipient. I acknowledge it’s not a clear line. The benefits of allowing unfettered debate, even requiring people to hear positions they don’t want to hear, outweigh the right of the person to say, ‘I don’t want to hear this.’ ”

At 52, Phillips is of medium height and build. His most prominent feature is a thick crop of curly black hair that has thinned little since his undergraduate days at Princeton, when he became a campus character of note for a few reasons. He occasionally played the tiger mascot at football games, sweating inside a furry orange-and-white suit. He co-founded the campus’s first pizza-delivery business. And in 1976, as a junior taking a disturbing seminar on nuclear proliferation, he wrote a thesis paper in which he attempted to design, from publicly available documents, a suitcase-sized nuclear device.

Freeman Dyson, the venerable physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, served as Phillips’s thesis adviser. “He was the most colorful character in the class,” Dyson remembers. “Very forthcoming, liking to show off a bit. Rather bumptious but very bright.” Dyson adds: “He was always very proud of his [middle] name.”

“Even for Princeton, where there were a lot of focused people, he had an unusual degree of focus and drive,” says Worth MacMurray, a college roommate. “For those very same reasons, he may have been a little too single-minded in his goals, to the detriment of personal relationships.”

That movie was never made, but the 1986 film The Manhattan Project, about a high-school student who builds an atomic bomb, was influenced by Phillips’s story, according to writer-director Marshall Brickman.

By the time he graduated from Princeton, Phillips had come up with a new outlet for his political beliefs. In 1980, he ran for Congress on the Democratic ticket in his home state of Connecticut’s Fourth District (now presided over by Republican Christopher Shays, a longtime Aristotle client). Early on, Phillips put in a request with Connecticut’s board of elections for the list of registered voters in his district. Such records were kept by every state, but obtaining them was no easy task. While technically public information, these lists were often jealously controlled by local party bosses. To gain access, a candidate had to have the right connections—or be willing to pay. In many places, as McCain learned in 2000, the system has not changed much.

“There was a realization: if we can’t get [the voter list], which we’re entitled to, then we’re dead,” Phillips says. Without it, he could not perform the basic tasks of a field campaign—sending mailers, knocking on doors, making phone calls.

Eventually he did acquire the list, and he had his brother, Dean, write a program, on his sleek new Apple II, to format it. The equivalent of a simple spreadsheet application, the program was advanced for its time. Most politicians were still stuck in the IBM punch-card era.

“It was instructive in how an insurgent campaign can go over the heads of the party bosses and around the screen the media puts up against contrary points of view and long-shot candidacies,” Phillips says. “And we actually won.”

The primary, that is. He lost in the general election to Republican Stewart McKinney. (He ran and lost again to McKinney in 1982.) The defeats left Phillips debt-strapped and unemployed, but also inspired by a realization: information would be the key to campaigns in the computer age.

After the 1982 election, word got out among Democratic operatives: with just one computer and an army of college kids, the story went, Phillips had beaten his older, better-financed primary opponents and lost within the margin of error to McKinney. Soon campaign offices were calling, asking to buy Dean’s software. Phillips made them an offer. Hire Phillips as a consultant, and he and Dean would cross-reference the voter lists with information from other sources. By late 1983, Aristotle Inc. was no longer just compiling voter lists but selling them to candidates all over the country. Phillips was making money. Even better, he was building a nationwide database of voters. Millions of them.

Though Phillips has perfected it, the idea of up-close-and-personal voter targeting did not originate with him. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln’s campaign tracked down registered Whig voters and wooed them to the Republican Party. In the modern era, 1960 was a watershed. Running as a relative unknown at the bottom of his party’s pack of big names (Adlai Stevenson, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey), John F. Kennedy needed to make his own luck. So, beginning months before the primaries, Kennedy’s men set up precinct-level organizations in states heavily favored to go to Humphrey, the labor-backed front-runner, logging every available detail about different groups of voters: how they lived, what they believed, what they wanted. In West Virginia, for example, Kennedy’s ground army picked off Humphrey’s trusted miners and union bosses one by one, with individualized messages about Social Security, poverty, and taxes, even appealing—in a masterstroke of political jujitsu that defused Kennedy’s biggest obstacle, his Catholicism—to their sense of religious tolerance. (Move ahead 44 years and put an “in-” before “tolerance” and the scenario sounds eerily familiar.) In 1976, the statistical shaman Pat Caddell refined this arduous process into precision polling and sent Jimmy Carter to the White House.

Phillips had studied the Kennedy and Carter campaigns, and he understood just how valuable information on individual voters could be to candidates seeking a competitive edge. So Phillips hired a corps of researchers to comb through records from the Census Bureau, the courts, post offices, you name it, and match the results with the names in his database.

The grunt work paid off, and a new era of campaigning began. In 1984, Aristotle was hired by Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale. In 1992, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, and Ross Perot were clients.

Aristotle’s offices look more like a disheveled start-up than a top-secret-ops center from a Tom Clancy novel. One small room contains a group of technicians speaking on headsets, another a cadre of mostly Indian programmers with thick accents. An IBM server tower fills an old closet. The office walls are decorated with bumper stickers from past campaigns.

“How much control should an individual have over their personal information?,” Phillips muses as he shows me around. “I think individuals should have more control than they do, significantly more control. Individuals ultimately should be required to provide their explicit consent for the use of that information. Now, there’s a big ‘however,’ and this is where the Constitution comes in. The Bill of Rights. There is a counterbalancing right to speech, and specifically political speech.”

Fair enough, but the problem is that Aristotle doesn’t just sell information to politicians. It also sells to commercial clients such as U.S. Bancorp, according to Federal Election Commission records. Currently, 22 states allow voter lists to be used for commercial purposes, while the remaining 28 place various restrictions on their use. Phillips says that, regardless of a given state’s regulations, Aristotle sells lists only to clients that intend to use them for political purposes.

But if Aristotle is not the most monstrous data-mining firm, some of the companies that furnish it with information vie for that honor. One such supplier is Acxiom, the Arkansas-based behemoth that stores unimaginable quantities of data. In 2003, a single hacker stole Acxiom records on 20 million people, according to Washington Post reporter Robert O’Harrow’s 2005 book, No Place to Hide.

“The idea of privacy is basically a joke to many of these firms,” O’Harrow says.

Aristotle also buys information from the San Diego–based market-research firm Claritas, which is a leader in the field of “consumer segmentation.” Claritas divides the U.S. into four major demographic groups and within those carves up another 66 subgroups, with specific information about education levels, likely fields of employment, tastes in cars and television shows, religious affiliations, hobbies, and more. There are Young Digerati, New Empty Nesters, and Blue Blood Estates, all the way down to Urban Ghetto, Shotguns and Pickups, and Bedrock Americans. (The brochure illustration for that last group shows a scruffy, tattooed man in a white tank top sitting in front of a pickup truck and a trailer, next to three bewildered-looking children and a dog.)

This segmentation is already fueling the growth of “political redlining,” according to Philip Howard. Campaigning has become so costly that politicians must decide which voters they should spend money targeting and which voters aren’t worth the expense. Poor and minority voters who don’t donate to candidates and who vote in dependable blocs get cut out of the process. “The data is used to figure out what areas you want to underserve,” Howard says.

“There’s a big risk of distortion if candidates know exactly what each voter cares about,” says Peter Swire, an attorney who dealt with privacy matters in the Clinton administration. “This reduces accountability; it creates a huge temptation to exaggerate or lie.” (Bill Clinton hired Claritas during his 1996 presidential campaign.)

However unsavory, the companies Aristotle does business with have deep ties in Washington. Acxiom’s recently retired C.E.O., Charles Morgan, is a longtime friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s. Wesley Clark, the retired general and former Democratic presidential candidate, used to sit on Acxiom’s board. Catalist, a data-mining firm providing voter lists to the Clinton campaign in the ’08 race, is presided over by Harold Ickes Jr., Bill’s onetime deputy chief of staff, and Laura Quinn, who held the same position in Al Gore’s office. In 2005, the Department of Justice alone bought $19 million worth of records from data miners, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Aristotle itself is well positioned not just in D.C. but in Silicon Valley as well. Among its board members is William Hambrecht, of the San Francisco private-equity firm W. R. Hambrecht & Co., which has helped bring public such Internet giants as Google and which now owns 27 percent of Aristotle. Epartners, a tech-investment vehicle of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., owns 13.5 percent. Esther Dyson, the prominent Internet entrepreneur (and daughter of Freeman Dyson), served as a director on Aristotle’s board in the late 1990s. “It seemed really intriguing,” she says of the company’s mission, “using market mechanisms to foster political action.” But she gave up her seat after concluding that Phillips was more interested in making a profit. “The focus changed,” she says.

In the 1980s and 90s, Phillips prided himself on helping insurgent candidates such as Perot, and he claims that this is still his goal. “Part of the reason we’re in the voter-data business is because when the Republican or Democratic National Committees want to stifle opinions in the party, the first thing they do is withhold access to voter lists,” he says. “That’s not right. In fact, its unconstitutional.”

F.E.C. filings from 2006–7 show, however, that the majority of Aristotle’s client candidates were and are Republicans. Among them are former House majority leader Tom DeLay and former California congressman Duke Cunningham. The National Rifle Association was once Aristotle’s biggest client. Phillips says he has no choice but to keep such strange bedfellows: his principles are at stake. “It’s not just that [the N.R.A.] has a right to use the best technology available to communicate with voters,” he says. “I think there’s an obligation with a company like ours to provide technology to a group like that, which has opinions which may not be popular.”

Phillips inspires lasting loyalty among his ranks—Aristotle’s management is full of Princeton alumni—but he also has a long list of detractors, and litigants. Since 1988, he has been the plaintiff in five lawsuits and the defendant in another five. In 2003, he sued Kentucky—as in “the state of”—for refusing to give Aristotle access to its voter lists. He has sued one former employee for allegedly disclosing trade secrets and is currently suing a competitor for what Phillips says are “false and deceptive advertising practices.”

Even some of Phillips’s bitterest critics, however, say they admire the work he’s done on behalf of developing democracies, particularly in Ukraine. In late 2004, Phillips helped presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko expose the vote fraud being perpetrated by his Kremlin-backed opponent, Viktor Yanukovich. Working out of a media war room he set up in Yushchenko’s Kiev headquarters, Phillips used state-of-the-art vote-monitoring technology to identify where the falsified returns were coming from and dispatched news crews and volunteers armed with cell-phone cameras to the hot spots.

“We had to prove to the public that we had recognized experts who would prove our case,” says Vadym S. Galaychuk, a Yushchenko campaign director. According to Galaychuk, whose candidate was poisoned and nearly killed during the race, Phillips was in danger the entire time, too. He moved around disguised as a local reporter, dressed in Ukrainian clothing, flashing a press pass. “There were constant threats of physical punishment,” Galaychuk says.

Increasingly, Phillips is taking his technology abroad. Shortly after our meeting, Phillips met with politicians from Algeria, Kosovo, and the Palestinian Fatah Party. He returned to Ukraine to help Yushchenko’s party again in the 2007 parliamentary elections, after consulting for a Hugo Chavez rival in Venezuela. More recently, Phillips has been negotiating with a major candidate in Pakistan. These places are a far cry from the congressional campaign offices in Illinois, Connecticut, and Georgia. But in Phillips’s vision of the future, the distance between a nascar dad in Atlanta and a clerk in Karachi is not wide.

“You can target Labour Party voters in the business section of London with the same systems you use to target people in the Virginia primary,” Phillips says, the excitement rising in his voice. “There are going to be global referenda in the not-too-distant future, I think, where people all over the world are going to vote at their A.T.M. machine, from their mobile phone. We’re getting to an age when there’s going to be that kind of direct democracy, and direct democracy requires ready access to the ability to communicate with voters.”

As he tells me this, Phillips picks up one of the custom-designed pocket-P.C. scanners that go with the Aristotle 360 system. With them, canvassers working for campaigns will swipe credit cards and driver’s licenses, take pictures of voters using an embedded micro-camera, and instantaneously feed all of the resulting information into the database. In fact, Phillips admits, 360 is being used in a handful of congressional races as we speak. He points the camera at me and snaps a shot.